Get Priorities Straight With The Philippines

December 3, 1985|By William F. Buckley Jr., Universal Press Syndicate

Our devotion to the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos is, as one would expect from similar anxieties to replace the Shah of Iran and Somoza of Nicaragua and Batista of Cuba, getting in the way of our strategic vision.

United Press International reports current attitudes in the Philippines by the three crystallizing political alternatives there.

The first, of course, is Marcos, who is running for -- hardly re- election, given that he has ruled by martial law since 1972 -- revalidation.

The second is an alliance of political parties gathered about Corazon Aquino, the 52-year-old widow of the assassinated opposition leader, Benigno Aquino.

The third candidate is a longtime opposition leader with a considerable following, Salvador Laurel.

The question of U.S. bases in the Philippines -- Subic Bay and Clark Air Base -- is receiving considerable attention in the warm-up before the February election, and Laurel has said that his position is that the whole question of the U.S. bases should be turned over to a national referendum after his election. Mrs. Aquino says, flatly, that the bases should be removed.

Marcos says that the U.S. bases should remain, and indeed that after the expiration of the current treaty in 1991, the leases should be extended. ''Otherwise,'' he says, ''there will be war in Asia, and that balance of power can be maintained only if those military bases are kept by the United States.'' To be sure, Mr. Marcos goes on to say that the next treaty should more explicitly describe the ''respective obligations and roles'' of the Philippines and the United States.

Whereas Philippine politics is an indigenous concern, the balance of power in the Pacific is an American concern, and Ferdinand Marcos sees this. This is the moment for skillful diplomacy. We need to go a step further than to leave our bases in the Philippines at the mercy of democratic whimsy.

It is usually better not to be too specific when describing sensitive negotiations and the direction they should go. But it would be a failure in American diplomacy if, by this time next year, we had less than a juridical right to maintain our bases there. They do, manifestly, no harm to the Philippines; Cuba has hardly been bothered by Guantanamo Bay.

But there is nowhere else in the area where naval and air forces adequate to cope with communist bases in Vietnam can be located, and it is the point of today's lesson that our concern should be less with the purification of Philippine democracy, which we can't in any event accomplish, than with the strategic security of the Pacific, which we can and have accomplished.